27 January 2016

Tata Steel Chess 2016, Round Ten

Caruana Closes the Gap!

I like blogging Grandmaster games while watching them live on the internet, but it can be exhausting. This morning, I considered blogging Navara -- Mamedyarov in this manner. They are playing in the Tata Steel Masters that is holding today's round in the Railway Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands. After the first six moves, the players reached a position that I had in one of my most memorable games (see "Pawn Wars").

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 g6 4.c3 a6 5.Ba4 d6 6.d4 Bd7

White to move

I was playing for a draw because I was tired from the prior round and inadequate sleep the night before, because I was playing the highest rated player in my city, and because I did not feel that I understood the position very well after 3...g6. Also, with a draw, I would finish in a tie for second place in the tournament. After liquidation of most of the pieces, my opponent and I brought our rooks to the open file and repositioned our knights. We repeated the position once, and then my opponent struck with a pawn break that we both thought should favor him. We were wrong. I won the game and finished in second place alone. That tournament pushed my rating over 1900 for the first time.

David Navara castled here and the game was drawn after a short fight that concluded in a rook endgame with two pawns each. I am sure that the game would have been instructive to follow live.

The game of the day, however, must be Caruana -- Wei. When the round began, Fabiano Caruana trailed Magnus Carlsen by one point. Carlsen drew his game against Anish Giri and Caruana beat Wei Yi.

The Tata Steel Masters shares an exciting feature with the K-12 section of the youth tournament that I ran on Saturday. In the youth tournament, three players finished with 4.0/5. The second seed beat the first, but lost to a newcomer. The first seed beat the newcomer. In Tata Steel, Navara beat Caruana, but lost to Wei, who then lost to Caruana.

Caruana's win brought him one-half point closer to Carlsen with three rounds remaining. Caruana faces Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Loek Van Wely, and Evgeny Toashevsky. Carlsen has yet to play Hou Yifan, Wesley So, and Ding Liren. Perhaps Caruana's remaining games are slightly easier, especially as Tomashevsky seems out of form.

I wrote most of these annotations without reference to the commentary before watching the two minute postgame interview with Caruana. After watching that video, I added two quotes to my annotations. Most of my variations seem worse for Black than in the game. I have not checked any part of the game or variations with an engine.

It is logical for Black to take an unprotected pawn, with the idea that while White is recapturing it Black gets a stake in the center. The chief disadvantage is that Black's position becomes a trifle loose. Nick DeFirmian, Modern Chess Openings, 13th ed. (1990), 27.

5...Be7 is the most popular move. Wei's choice was slightly more popular in the nineteenth century, and was a favorite of Victor Korchnoi in the 1960s and 1970s.

6.d4 b5 7.Bb3 d5 8.dxe5 Be6 9.c3

9.Nbd2 is second most popular. The effort to gain the two bishops with 9...Na5 runs aground to 10.Nxe4 Nxb3 11.axb3 dxe4 12.Ng5 Qxd1 (12...Bd5 13.Qe2 and Black is losing a pawn; 12...Bd7?? 13.Qd5+-) 13.Rxd1 Bf5 when Black's other weaknesses more than compensate for the two bishops.

9...Be7 10.Bc2

"A rare move." Caruana

10.Nbd2 is played vastly more often; 10.Re1 is also popular.

10...Bg4

This sharp move appears in sixteen games in my database. White has done well.

Caruana's novelty appears to create problems for Black that are more difficult to solve than the loss of a pawn. The bishop on g6 may be vulnerable to a pawn storm, for instance. It is instructive that White's king seems impervious to attack even with all of the kingside pawns marching forward.Caruana has still been playing extremely fast, spending only a few seconds per move. According to the move times at ChessBase News, his longest move time up to this point was 35 seconds for 9.c3.

Youth Chess

Scholastic players and parents: The label "Problem of the Week" links to posts that contain my "lesson of the week." These blog posts serve to reinforce what is presented in my after school and in-school chess clubs.

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